E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics

• The Safety of Government Debt

  Staff Working Paper 2013-34 Kartik Anand, Prasanna Gai

  We examine the safety of government bonds in the presence of Knightian uncertainty amongst financial market participants. In our model, the information insensitivity of government bonds is driven by strategic complementarities across counterparties and the structure of trading relationships.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Financial stability, International financial markets JEL Code(s): D, D8, D81, E, E4, E44, F, F0, F02, F4, F41, G, G1, G15

• Housing and Tax Policy

  Staff Working Paper 2013-33 Sami Alpanda, Sarah Zubairy

  In this paper, we investigate the effects of housing-related tax policy measures on macroeconomic aggregates using a dynamic general-equilibrium model.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Fiscal policy, Housing JEL Code(s): E, E6, E62, H, H2, H24, R, R3, R38

• Forecasting the Real Price of Oil in a Changing World: A Forecast Combination Approach

  Staff Working Paper 2013-28 Christiane Baumeister, Lutz Kilian

  The U.S. Energy Information Administration regularly publishes short-term forecasts of the price of crude oil.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods, International topics JEL Code(s): C, C5, C53, E, E3, E32, Q, Q4, Q43

• Analyzing Fiscal Sustainability

  Staff Working Paper 2013-27 Huixin Bi, Eric M. Leeper

  The authors study the implications of fiscal policy behaviour for sovereign risk in a framework that determines a country’s fiscal limit, the point at which, for economic or political reasons, taxes and spending can no longer adjust to stabilize debt.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Fiscal policy JEL Code(s): E, E6, E62, E65, H, H6, H63

• Uncertain Fiscal Consolidations

  Staff Working Paper 2013-26 Huixin Bi, Eric M. Leeper, Campbell Leith

  The paper explores the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal consolidations whose timing and composition - either tax- or spending-based - are uncertain.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Economic models, Fiscal policy, Monetary policy and uncertainty JEL Code(s): E, E6, E62, E63, H, H3, H30, H6, H60
• August 15, 2013

  CSI: A Model for Tracking Short-Term Growth in Canadian Real GDP

  Bank of Canada Review - Summer 2013 André Binette, Jae Chang

  Canada’s Short-Term Indicator (CSI) is a new model that exploits the information content of 32 indicators to produce daily updates to forecasts of quarterly real GDP growth. The model is a data-intensive, judgment-free approach to short-term forecasting. While CSI’s forecasts at the start of the quarter are not very accurate, the model’s accuracy increases appreciably as more information becomes available. CSI is the latest addition to a wide range of models and information sources that the Bank of Canada uses, combined with expert judgment, to produce its short-term forecasts.

  Content Type(s): Publications, Bank of Canada Review articles Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C5, C53, E, E1, E17, E3, E37
• August 15, 2013

  The Accuracy of Short-Term Forecast Combinations

  Bank of Canada Review - Summer 2013 Eleonora Granziera, Corinne Luu, Pierre St-Amant

  This article examines whether combining forecasts of real GDP from different models can improve forecast accuracy and considers which model-combination methods provide the best performance. In line with previous literature, the authors find that combining forecasts generally improves forecast accuracy relative to various benchmarks. Unlike several previous studies, however, they find that, rather than assigning equal weights to each model, unequal weighting based on the past forecast performance of models tends to improve accuracy when forecasts across models are substantially different.

  Content Type(s): Publications, Bank of Canada Review articles Topic(s): Econometric and statistical methods JEL Code(s): C, C5, C52, C53, E, E3, E37
• August 15, 2013

  Monitoring Short-Term Economic Developments in Foreign Economies

  Bank of Canada Review - Summer 2013 Russell Barnett, Pierre Guérin

  The Bank of Canada uses several short-term forecasting models for the monitoring of key foreign economies - the United States, the euro area, Japan and China. The design of the forecasting models used for each region is influenced by the level of detail required, as well as the timeliness and volatility of data. Forecasts from different models are typically combined to mitigate model uncertainty, and judgment is applied to the model forecasts to incorporate information that is not directly reflected in the most recent indicators.

  Content Type(s): Publications, Bank of Canada Review articles Topic(s): Business fluctuations and cycles JEL Code(s): E, E3, E37

• Is There a Quality Bias in the Canadian CPI? Evidence from Micro Data

  Staff Working Paper 2013-24 Oleksiy Kryvtsov

  Rising consumer prices may reflect shifts by consumers to new higher-priced products, mostly for durable and semi-durable goods. I apply Bils’ (2009) methodology to newly available Canadian consumer price data for non-shelter goods and services to estimate how price increases can be divided between quality growth and price inflation.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Inflation and prices, Potential output JEL Code(s): E, E3, E31, M, M1, M11, O, O4, O47

• The Threat of Counterfeiting in Competitive Search Equilibrium

  Staff Working Paper 2013-22 Enchuan Shao

  Recent studies in monetary theory show that if buyers can use lotteries to signal the quality of bank notes, counterfeiting does not occur in a pooling equilibrium. In this paper, I investigate the robustness of this non-existence result by considering an alternative trading mechanism.

  Content Type(s): Staff research, Staff working papers Topic(s): Bank notes JEL Code(s): D, D8, D82, D83, E, E4, E42